Now that we have more than 10,000 votes in our baby name poll I can start doing some basic statistical analysis. One of the things I’d like to do is figure out which names are popular in our poll, but still relatively unique compared to all those other babies being named out there.

Before I get to that, though, I want to make sure that our vote totals are significantly different from random.

Heads up: What follows is a basic intro to some concepts in statistics that I’m writing mainly to keep myself sharp. I haven’t done much research recently and I don’t want to get rusty. Feel free to read along, at the end I’ll show you how to detect the influence of Australians.

Since the data for names included in the poll is completely different from the write-in votes, we’ll concentrate on the pre-selected names for now.